The present embodiments relate to wireless communication systems and, more particularly, to the precoding of Physical Downlink Shared Channel (PDSCH) data and the associated demodulation reference signals with codebook-based feedback for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmissions.
With Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), multiple symbols are transmitted on multiple carriers that are spaced apart to provide orthogonality. An OFDM modulator typically takes data symbols into a serial-to-parallel converter, and the output of the serial-to-parallel converter is considered as frequency domain data symbols. The frequency domain tones at either edge of the band may be set to zero and are called guard tones. These guard tones allow the OFDM signal to fit into an appropriate spectral mask. Some of the frequency domain tones are set to values which will be known at the receiver. Among these are Channel State Information Reference Signals (CSI-RS) and Dedicated or Demodulation Reference Signals (DMRS). These reference signals are useful for channel estimation at the receiver.
In multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication systems with multiple transmit/receive antennas, the data transmission is performed via precoding. Here, precoding refers to a linear (matrix) transformation of L-stream data into P-stream where L denotes the number of layers (also termed the transmission rank) and P denotes the number of transmit antennas. With the use of dedicated (i.e. user-specific) DMRS, a transmitter, such as a base station or eNB (eNB), can perform precoding operations that are transparent to user equipment (UE) acting as receivers. It is beneficial for the base station to obtain a precoding matrix recommendation from the user equipment. This is particularly the case for frequency-division duplexing (FDD) where the uplink and downlink channels occupy different parts of the frequency bands, i.e. the uplink and downlink are not reciprocal. Hence, a codebook-based feedback from the UE to the eNB is preferred. To enable a codebook-based feedback, a precoding codebook needs to be designed.
The 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) specification includes codebooks for 2-antenna, 4-antenna, and 8-antenna transmissions. While those codebooks are designed efficiently, the present inventors recognize that still further improvements in downlink (DL) spectral efficiency are possible. Accordingly, the preferred embodiments described below are directed toward these problems as well as improving upon the prior art.